King
James Version. A translation of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles (the
``Old and New
Testaments,'' according to a Christian theory) commissioned by King James I
of England (a/k/a James VI of Scotland) and first published in 1611. It was
also called the Authorized Version (AV), because for
a couple of centuries following it was the only English translation of the
Bible permitted to be published in the British Empire (and it could only be
published with Royal approval). The membership of the translation committees
is mostly unknown, but there are hints and theories, particularly that William
Shakespeare was a contributor. King James himself was an acknowledged expert
on witchcraft and the divine right of kings. More about him and the bard at
the swashbuckle entry.

The earliest version of the King James Version included translations of the
so-called Apocrypha, which were later deauthorized. So it goes. The first
revision of the KJV to be authorized for the Anglican communion was the
HBRV.

In the slang that my apartment mates and I used when I was in college, ``Kuala
Lumpur!'' was an expression of amazement, like ``wow!'' I don't know how that
usage got started, but it has the multisyllabic advantage that you can really
drag it out and put some emotion into it. Obviously, we had no use for the
abbreviation. You might want to read the UNITA
entry now.

So far as I'm aware, the resemblance to the word koala (the bearcub-like
eucalyptus-colonizing marsupial of Australia) is completely coincidental.

At one point, we experimented with saying ``The Lab'' in unison (not
that kind of unison) with extreme
seriousness, but before we got around to thinking up what it should mean, we
discovered that the performance was too embarrassing to be of any practical
use.

Dannon Yogurt had a series of TV commercials in those days, featuring old
people who ate yogurt. There was one that featured what we called ``the
dancing dead men of [Soviet] Georgia.'' (These guys were illiterate, and in
follow-up studies, researchers asked them how old they were and got answers
that were ten years more than they had gotten five years earlier. Something
about like that.) We had a gesture we performed frequently to indicate
ecstatic joy. With an expression of chloroformed surprise, one would raise his
hands above his head at pope speed (I mean, arthritically), then turn the palms
back and forth on a vertical axis. We called this the Kaymore V'nacha, after
the old guy who performed it in the commercial. Actually, it turns out that
his name was Temur Vanacha. One of the Dannon dancing dead men (seated) is
featured on the cover of The Best Thing on TV: Commercials, by Jonathan
Price (NY: Viking, 1978), and the ad is storyboarded on pp. 154-5 with the
caption ``Most fondly remembered commercial.''

Just in case you were wondering, we did all graduate, eventually.

Allowing for the k-to-t correction, Mr. Vanacha's given name sounded (in the ad
narrator's pronunciation) like ``Taymore.'' As it happens, one Julie Taymor is
a Broadway director. She directed the ``The Lion King'' (a musical based on
the Disney movie based on the Japanese movie) and was the original director of
``Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,'' a musical that she co-wrote with Glen
Berger.

Slang for kilometer, and elliptically for
kph. Also spelled ``click.'' The
OED claims that the latter is the usual spelling in
Australia.

When I first encountered the word in the 1970's, the context implied that it
was Canadian military usage, and I don't know how
far back it goes. I heard a US serviceman say it on TV during the 2003 Iraq
war. Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang, first lists
it (also with the spelling click) in the 1967 Supplement.

There is a German word Klotz that means a `block' -- of wood
(Holz) if the material is not otherwise
specified. The Yiddish cognate of that is used in the transferred sense of `a
butterfingers, a person who drops, knocks over, and breaks things.'' (I
presume that the implication is a butterfingers is a blockhead.) The word
klutz was adopted in its Yiddish sense in English, with typical spelling
klutz (I've seen klotz as a variant). Old English had a cognate
as well, with the sense of `a shapeless mass, lump': clot. A variant of
this word arose by the 14th century: clod, and the two words' meanings
diverged somewhat, with clod typically being a lump of earth and
clot typically being a lump of coagulated blood. I guess it's not
surprising that clod has a transferred sense similar to klutz.

.km

(Domain code for) Comoros. An island group between Mozambique and
Madagascar. The capital is Moroni.

KM

Kennewick Man. A couple of college students were wading through the
shallows of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, on Sunday, 28 July
1996 (my birthday! oh sorry, my mistake, not my birthday), when one of them
stubbed his toe on a human skull partly buried in the sand. They thought it
might be a murder victim and called the police. It turned out to be a
prehistoric male, 9500 years old by carbon dating (after calibration). (But
no, he looked to be only 40 to 55 years old when he died.) He became quite
intriguing because the skull is clearly (or not, if that bothers you) not very
like in form to the skulls of what we normally call ``Native Americans'' these
days.

There were many articles on it. See, for example, ``The Lost Man'' in the
June 16, 1997 issue of The New Yorker, pp. 70-81.

From the remains it is estimated that KM was 5'9'' (175 cm) tall, which was
rather tall compared to the prehistoric Amerindians of the Northwest. Also.
The shape of the face is intermediate between northern Asian and American
Indian (short, broad faces) and southern Pacific and European populations (tall
and narrow). (Look in the mirror... ``I'm adopted!'') KM falls into an
intermediate group more closely resembling the Clovis and Folsom people, the
earliest large human populations known in the New World. The condition of
those older remains has prevented DNA analysis, but
it might be possible with KM. (But
most probably,
useful DNA data could not be recovered from the KM remains.) It's been
suggested that KM is a descendant of the Clovis people -- a minority survival
among a majority population of later immigrants from North Asia. Other
possibilities are that he was just an unusually tall, narrow-faced guy, or that
his boat got caught in a strong current and he's really from another continent.
We won't learn anything further, at least from the KM remains, that might help
decide these or any other scientific questions, because pursuant to the terms
of NAGPRA, the US
DOI determined in September 2001 to turn over the
remains (about 350 bone fragments) to a consortium of Native American tribes
that claims KM is ``culturally affiliated'' to them. The majority of those
tribes wanted to rebury him.

Hey, this seems somewhat interesting. I wonder if it's discussed anywhere on
the Internet. Whoa! Okay, here're some good starting points:

Kresge MART. (Not that the expansion
is official or was ever used, afaik.) A chain of discount department stores.

Sebastian Spering Kresge opened a small five-and-dime store in downtown
Detroit in 1899. Five-and-dimes were the dollar
stores of that era. He had expanded to 85 stores by 1912. In 1959, Harry B.
Cunningham became president of the S. S. Kresge Company. He pushed a
plan that led to the launching of the first Kmart in 1962. The first Kmart
store opened in Garden City, Michigan; seventeen more Kmart stores opened that
year. (Kmart went bankrupt in, I think, 2001, and emerged from Chapter 11 in
May 2003.) The Kmart competitors Woolco (now defunct, along with its parent
Woolworth's), Target, and Wal-Mart were all also launched in 1962.

K-Mart

Nickname of NBA player
Kenyon
MARTin, a 6'9" power forward out of
Cincinnati, drafted (2000) by the New Jersey Nets, still with the Nets in 2004
as I write this entry.

KMFDM

Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit. German, `No mercy for the
majority.' The acronym (not its expansion) is the name of a rock band.
Here's more.

KMITL

King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang. Mongkut hasn't been the
king of Siam since the nineteenth century, when he unfortunately died.

KMP

Kangaroo Management Program. Sounds like cat-herding to me, but it's
apparently a charge of the Australian Nature
Conservation Agency. The Stammtisch has conducted a mostly theoretical
investigation of kangaroo kicking. A major finding is that kangaroos are
capable of delivering a mean kick.

People who keep kangaroos as pets have been able to train them to not jump
indoors. I figure anyone with a ceiling could do that.

KMT

Abbreviation, or just a representation of the written word in a consonantal
spelling (what alphabets originally were), of Kemet, an old Egyptian
name for Egypt meaning `black land.' The
name of a magazine that is a sort
of National Geographic of Ancient Egyptian Archaeology. Full title:
KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt.

Black is good: black here stands for fertile, Nile-washed soil, like the
humus-laden black earth of the fertile triangle of Russia. (The ``fertile
crescent'' refers to the Levant-Syria-Mesopotamia region.)

The word chemistry comes from the Greek word chemia. That
doesn't seem to be an Indo-European word, and one
popular hypothesis is that it simply refers to Egypt. If the etymological
guesses are right, then it makes sense to interpret chemistry as `black
arts.'

KMT

Kinetic Molecular Theory. Older name for Kinetic Theory of Gases.

KMT

Kuo Min Tang. Loser, 1949, against Mao-led, Soviet-assisted Communists in
Chinese civil war. Chiang Kai-Shek took the remnants of his government to
Taiwan, where Kuo Min Tang has ruled and evolved into a fairly democratic party.

.kn

(Domain code for) Saint Kitts and Nevis.

KN

King's kNight. Designation in the descriptive notation for the
file designated g in the algebraic notations.
See Kt entry, too.

Kn

Knudsen number. Bird, Boyd and Chen have defined a generalized local
Kn as the mean free path times the gradient of the logarithm of any
macroscopic quantity.

A speed of one nautical mile per hour. The only artificially defined speed
unit in common use that doesn't have a derived-unit name like
MPH or KPH.

If you read the entry for nmi., the abbreviation of
nautical mile, you'll understand why traveling at sixty knots will take you
across an angular distance of one degree of the Earth's surface per hour.
That's about one time zone every fifteen hours at the equator.

A moderately informative name ending. A Slavic surname ending in -ko is
very probably Ukrainian.

A Japanese given name ending in -ko (a diminutive suffix) is very probably
female unless it ends in -hiko, in which case it is probably male. (As
pronounced, the -hiko may sound to non-native ears like -hko or -shko.) That
diminutive suffix ko is written with a kanji that basically means
`child,' and which frequently means `small' or `slight' in compounds. (But it
can also mean `child' in compounds: for example, mamako means
`stepchild.' For more of that step- stuff, see
mama-haha.) Another pronunciation
(``reading'') of the same kanji is shi, which occurs in the word
shoshika, explained at the
rejârando-ka entry.

(An easily recognized use of -ko is in panko, meaning `breadcrumb[s].'
Pan, meaning `bread,' is a centuries-old loan of the Portuguese
pão. Oops, sorry: that -ko is the kanji meaning `powder.'
Grumble, grumble.)

KO

Knock Out. Usually quite violently.

Biologists, particularly geneticists, use a lot of knock-out animals,
but that's a different idea, with the violence occurring at the
DNA level. The ``KO'' initialism is widely used
in the literature, both as such and as part of other initialisms. For example,
CTRKO is calcitonin receptor knock-out,
DKO is double knock-out. See also
TKO.

The koala is an Australian marsupial. Everyone knows that. Hence, we are
able to build on this base knowledge by making gratuitous tangential references
to koalas at the Kuala Lumpur (KL) and
Polish entries. (See also
wombat.) Koalas only eat eucalyptus shoots and
leaves. (Lynne Truss's surprise best-seller about proper punctuation in
English is titled Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The cover is
illustrated with pandas, which only eat bamboo shoots and leaves.)
According to a potato chip I read (see bongo
entry), this makes koalas stink of cough drops.

Potassium (K) Hydroxide. If you're trying to exclude carbonates, note that
KOH pellets stored in an atmosphere containing CO2 may have
carbonate on the surface. Wash'em twice before use. (Analytical chemists are
so fussy. Evian isn't good enough for them either, they
want TDW or DI.)

If you weren't going to use KOH pellets, then it was probably a complete
waste of time for you to read not only the above caveat, but also this
very sentence, especially now.

A Greek with simplified grammar and somewhat
reduced vocabulary, widely used in Middle Eastern regions Hellenized by
Alexander's conquests. It's the one sort of Ancient
Greek still relatively widely taught that is never called Classical Greek.

Philo of Alexandria, Polybius, and Flavius Josephus wrote in Koine, and the
language of the Christian Testament, written in the first centuries of this
era, is believed to resemble spoken Koine closely. The Septuagint
(LXX), a second-century Alexandrian translation of
the Hebrew Bible (based, according to tradition, on a consensus of seventy
translators) is written in Koine, although it contains some
Egyptian peculiarities. There are some scattered
related thoughts at the GJohn entry.

KOK

Kansainvälisen olympiakomitean. Come on,
you can guess this one. Okay, a hint: it's Finnish for
IOC.

KOL

Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratorium, Leiden (Netherlands).

KOM

Knight of the Order of Malta.

kombucha

Some kind of fermented
Japanese mushroom tea. This is not really a definition entry. I didn't
really put this entry here in order that anyone might learn what kombucha is.
Rather, it is an antimisdefinition. The only reason for the entry is to avoid
having anyone suppose that kombucha was something else that it is not.

Koming

A man's given name. Also, an Indonesian surname.

KOMING

Editing notation used at the old Lifemagazine. Not exactly equivalent to
TK (q.v.) as used elsewhere, because this was
essentially an instruction to the fact-``checker'' to fill in the missing
information. According to That was the LIFE (New
York: Norton, 1977), Dora Jane Hamblin's memoir of her quarter century
there as a fact-checker, reporter, and staff writer...

Writers and editors, faced with the need to make even the most banal
occurrence seem important, reached always for superlatives or piquant details
and, if they couldn't find them in the assembled newsclips and reporters'
files, simply inserted the word KOMING.
KOMING was a Life word which meant, in short, ``this
fascinating fact will be forthcoming.''

Those who forthcomed it were the researchers. They became quite accustomed
to being asked, at midnight, to fill in ``there are KOMING
rivets in the bridge,'' or ``there are
KOMING trees in Russia,'' or ``this was the
KOMING Bingo game in history.'' Obviously on the latter the
writer wanted to say ``biggest,'' but he needed a checker to prove it for him.

[Above is from p. 78, op. cit.]

An advantage of editing notations like KOMING and
000 (q.v.) is that they are recognizable
and yet extremely unlikely to be intended to appear in the text of an article.

Fact-checkers were also required to put pencil dots over each word checked,
as a supposed check that they had actually checked. They had to use red
pencil for names, dates, and titles, and green pencil for material that
could be expended in sizing.

Various national laboratories use schemes reminiscent of Life's dots in
order to maintain security: guards may be required to touch the identification
(ID) badge of each individual entering at the gate.
The idea is that this decreases the chances that a guard will inattentively let
someone through who isn't authorized to enter a secure area.

Should be Koopmans's Theorem (it's the theorem of one Koopmans, not
Koopman and Koopman), but what can you do? Same problem with ``Graves'
Disease.'' It could be worse, I suppose; at least it's not called
``Koopmen's Theorem.''

And it's not even a theorem -- it's just an obvious lazy approximation that
works okay because large errors approximately cancel. I'm disgusted.

Kopf

For your convenience, we have distributed information related to this
German noun at a number of places in this glossary
(redundantly, so you won't miss anything important). Here, enjoy:

A German word which can be literally translated `head dress,' and means
`hat' or `cap' of any sort, but has the extravagantly technical feel of a word
like `headgear.' The German word Hut can refer to a hat but definitely
not a wool cap. A cap is a Mütze or Kappe (the latter tends
to be smaller, about the size of the cap part of a baseball cap). In English,
a woman's wool cap (Wollmütze) can be called a hat, although a
man's usually is not. All of this is subject to regional variation.

An ancient Greek word for merde. Do I have to spell this out? In
Homer, Herodotus, and elsewhere, hé kópros is `the dung,
ordure, manure, etc.' Homer uses it in a transferred sense of `farm-yard,
home-stead.' (I'm cribbing from the middle
Liddell here, so don't ask me for more detailed cites. You find a lot of
examples on TLG if you have a subscription.
Otherwise use Perseus.)

KOPS

Kilo Operations Per Second. You don't want
ever to have an occasion to use this unit either (I allude to
KIPS). Try MegaFLOPS.

kore

Those ancient Greeks were such habitual perverts that they had this special
word for a statue if it depicted a woman with her clothes on.

Kos

Nickname of a boy named MarKOS. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, posting as
kos, blogs at Daily Kos, one of
the most prominent leftist blogs of the US in 2005.
He was probably the most prominent netroots
organizer in the 2006 midterm election cycle. In that year, the first annual
YearlyKos was held June 8-11 in Las Vegas. Everyone enjoyed it. Kos acolytes
-- some of them, anyway -- it's not a cult! -- call themselves Kossacks.

An underappreciated aspect of blogging is that lightning commentary without
benefit of editing gives rise to transparency. No time for second thoughts,
no time to repair Freudian slips.

Kos also composes paino music. In 1996, he recorded a piece called
``Solipsistic Affirmations.'' Indeed. (Rereading this entry some time later,
I think I had left the typo intentionally uncorrected.)

kosher

There's a
directory of kosher places to eat at, but no one has a convincing
explanation of why Ashkenazim can't eat corn,
let alone kitniot, for Pesach.

It gives you an idea of how important it is to minimize mechanical stresses
when you consider that kovar is a pretty cruddy conductor
(2.05 × 106 S/m, about 1/17 that of aluminum).
Of course, package leads don't have to be thin.

KP

Small greyish-white spots which stick to the back of the cornea.

Ewww.

KP

Kitchen Police. A military punishment that results in at best
indifferently peeled potatoes.

KPII is not as interesting mathematically as KPI
(+3 --> -3) because it has no two-dimensional soliton solutions, but it does
occur more frequently in physical models. [Per A. Senatorski and
E. Infeld, ``Simulations of Two-Dimensional Kadomtsev-Petviashvili Soliton
Dynamics in Three-Dimensional Space,'' Physical Review Letters[PRL]77, 2855-2858 (1996.09.30).]

(Brian) Kernighan and (Dennis) Ritchie. Authors of the first and
definitive book about the programming language C.
The first edition (K&R1) was based on early implementations of the
language; the second edition (K&R2), on the version standardized in
1989 and called ANSI C, ISO C, Standard C, or C89.

Buy it.

KR

King's Rook. Designation in the descriptive notation for the
file designated h in the algebraic notations
(the far right file, if you're white). One of the two files labeled
R, for Rook.

Emergency field rations used by US troops in
WW II. Single meals. Named for the physiologist
Ancel Benjamin Keys. This might be regarded as
an eponym in acronymic form.

KREEP

K (chemical symbol for potassium),
Rare Earth Elements, and
Phosphorus. The acronym is applied to an unusual
sort of basalt returned from the surface of the moon by Apollo astronauts. The
basalts have unusually high concentrations of the elements that define the
acronym.

KRG

Kurdistan Regional Government. The government of the Kurd-dominated region
of northern Iraq in the period following the removal of the national government
in the Allied invasion of 2003. A national government in all but name, in 2006
it concluded a deal with DNO, a Norwegian oil company, to investigate oil
reserves near Dohuk. Kurdish is the first language of instruction in public
schools of all levels, and there is in 2006 a move to make English, rather than
Arabic, the principal second language.

Kinetoplast RiboNucleic Acid. RNA that is a
transcription of kDNA, q.v.

KRU

Kids Research
Unlimited. Market research. ``... the level of comfort you need in
knowing that your kids' research is coming from a parent company who's
the leader in youth research.'' The parent company is
Teenage Research Unlimited (videTRU).
Great. Kids having kids.

Keats-Shelley Association of America. They sponsor a homepage for
their Keats-Shelley
Journal which ``is published annually (in print form) [and] contains
articles on John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt,
and their circles--as well as news and notes, book reviews, and a current
bibliography.''

KSC

Kennedy Space Center.
NASA's main launch facility, located on Cape
Canaveral in Florida, which from 1963 to 1973 was
also called Cape Kennedy. Speaking just for myself, I prefer the name
Kennedy because it's easier to spell.

KSDS

Key-Sequenced Data Sets. Most popular kind of data set created with
VSAM.

King Saud University. Known
as the Harvard of the Wahhabi Muslims. Okay, that's not, like,
actually, factually true. You don't believe? Fifty
lashes!

If I think of something to add, maybe I'll break these out into separate
entries. It's not a taggo or anything like that, see?

KSU

Key Service Unit. I don't really know what this means, exactly, but
there's an expansion, anyway.

KSV

Kinetic Safety Vehicle. An experimental car. (This is a mid-seventies
entry. The KSV may not be very cutting-edge anymore.) A KSV is sort of a
compromise. The static safety vehicle can be made much safer, and it
can circle the earth's axis in just twenty-four hours with negligible fuel
consumption, but it's not very maneuverable.

KSV

Knight[s] of the Order of Saint Vladimir.

There ought to be a word game
like magnetic poetry that allows you to mix and match acronym expansions
to produce hippogriffs like Knights of Saint Vehicular, etc.

J. C. Trewin, recalling the touring repertories of 1920's England,
has written

These companies, working on a small budget, kept to a familiar run of plays:
among the tragedies, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet,
and Julius Caesar; among the comedies, The Merchant of Venice,
The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Twelfth Night,
and less often, The Merry Wives of Windsor, though this had seldom been
out of [touring-company director Frank] Benson's programme in the old days
when, as the late Henry Caine said once, a week usually began with `The Merry
Shrews of Venice.'

(According to a footnote, Henry Caine, 1888-1962, made this remark to Trewin at
St. Ives, Cornwall, in August 1959.)

KnighT. A chess piece, and a file designation in the ``descriptive
notation'' of chess; see explanation at file.
The Knight initially nearer the Queen (Q) is indicated QKt, for Queen's Knight, the one
on the other side KKt, for King's Knight (see K).

Note that these are not exactly equivalent. King's Knight and Queen's Knight
only designate files (q.v.) on a
chessboard. Knight can designate either of those two files, as well
as one of the four pieces called a Knight.

An alternative, less traditional (as I understand it) abbreviation for
Knight is N.

Every allowed move of a Knight moves it onto a square whose color is
different from the one it's on. For equally fascinating thoughts, see
the B (for Bishop) entry.

KT

Kosterlitz-Thouless. Theory of certain borderline phase transitions in
two-dimensional systems with vortices. Seminal paper in 1973. Later
major developments by Halperin and Nelson, 1978, and Young, 1979.

kT

Kilotesla. In the early 1990's a highly
respected member of the Stammtisch (granted this is pleonastic) suffered the
same indignity at the paws of two different European journals, which journals
shall remain unnamed out of mercy to the guilty and because I forgot to ask
what they were. In papers that involved physical chemistry but nothing of
magnetism, the expression `kT' was copyedited as `kilotesla.'

This is probably a sign of the imminent collapse of civilization, or at least
the collapse of eminent civilization, but we may as well entertain an
alternative interpretation: In the rush to establish a net presence, a number
of journals that have previously published camera-ready papers have moved to an
edited format, as this entails little work in excess of that needed to mark up
articles as hypertext. A number of new copyeditors must have been hired who
are unfamiliar with scientific typesetting or science. I suppose he might have
protected himself by writing kBT.

Kt.

KnighT. The flesh-and-blood kind. The kind on a chessboard are
abbreviated N, but see the Kt entry.

KT

Knight[s] Templar. Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of
the Thistle. Founded in 1687, some time after the last crusade. The original
knights templar were supposed to protect or occupy the temple mount in
Jerusalem.

Umberto Eco has written

I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and non-lunatics.
After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody
brings up the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic.

Kidney Transplant/Dialysis
Association. ``[A]n all-volunteer, patient-run, 501(c)(3) non-profit
organization made up of kidney dialysis and transplant patients, kidney donors,
their families and friends, and health professionals. Our officers are
themselves kidney patients or spouses of kidney patients. Now [site visited
Dec. 2009] with over 2,200 members across New England, as well as throughout
the country, the KT/DA is dedicated to providing financial aid, information,
and emotional support to chronic renal disease patients and their families.''

Kronreif, Trunkenpolz, Mattighofen.
A motorcycle manufacturer that once actually used that mellifluous sequence of
names as its own name, after company founders Ernst Kronreif and Hans
Trunkenpolz, and after Mattighofen, Austria, their
center of operations.

A famous Czech writer. We mention him at various entries around the
glossary, although the being entry is the only one
with substantive information about him. Recently, though, I came across some
Kundera-related stuff that seemed to merit an actual Kundera entry, so here we
are.

kung fu

An oriental martial art -- the one true way of hurting people honorably
and ceremoniously, according to ancient tradition, requires an echo chamber
as well as a roomful of electronic sound-effects equipment.

Keep Up The Good Work. A bit of Textingese or whatever that featured
prominently in a WSJ article by Stephanie Raposo posted
online August 6, 2009. The article title was ``Quick! Tell Us What
KUTGW Means.''

I've never encountered it, but it was also listed in an accompanying sample
of ``popular shorthand texting terms.'' This is ``popular''? It's praise, how
could it be popular? Oh, I get it: irony.

KnightVision. A version of BlackBoard software
used at Calvin College in
Grand Rapids, Michigan and presumably elsewhere.
I mean the s/w is presumably used elsewhere, not that Calvin College is -- you
understand.

Good news about customer satisfaction! Reportedly, students only hate
KnightVision to the degree that they are forced to use it.

KVA

Kilo Volt-Ampere. A common abbreviation on
electrical equipment. Although a watt equals a volt-ampere (i.e. volt
times ampere), so KVA can in principle stand for kilowatt, power engineers make
a distinction: kW and W
units are used to label for power; KVA and VA are used to label something else
that has units of power: ``apparent power.''

The difference comes into play in alternating current. If we consider the
simple case of ordinary single-phase current (and we had better, because that's
all I understand), then voltages and currents are normally given in terms of
their root mean square (rms) values. If the voltage
is a sinusoidal signal oscillating between +170V and -170V, then the square
root of the average of the sqared voltage is 120V (i.e., the rms voltage
is down a factor of 0.7071 from the peak voltage value). If you put this
voltage across a simple resistance, then the current is in phase with the
voltage, and the factors work out so that the time-average rate of power
dissipation is just the product of Irms and Vrms. This
power can be labelled indifferently in watts (W) or volt-amperes (VA).

If the effective impedance of the load is complex (i.e., if the current
through a power-consuming device is not in phase with the voltage), then the
product Irms × Vrmsdoes not represent the
power consumption. Instead, while there is power dissipation in phase with the
voltage, there is out of phase with it as power that is alternately stored in
the device and returned by the device. For example, in an inductor, this is
energy stored in the magnetic field generated by the current in the coil.

The circuit situation is represented by writing the current and voltage as
phasors. Phasor is just an unnecessary extra word for a two-dimensional vector
rotating at constant frequency; a complex number with time dependence
exp(jwt). [Here j is the imaginary constant, what everyone who
is not an electrical engineer writes i; t is time, and w
is easier to get to appear on your screen than the angular frequency omega.]
Okay, then: if there is some reactance (imaginary component of impedance), then
the current and voltage phasors point in different directions. Let's call the
phase difference, the angle, Ø (phi). [Okay, just between you and me,
it's really a Swedish vowel, but it's close enough.
Sheesh, gimme a break whydontcha.]

Say the complex voltage is

V(t) = Vpexp(jwt),

with Vp real. Then the current is

I(t) = Ipexp(jwt+jØ),

with Ip also real. Now consider the complex product

(I(t))*V(t) =
Ip Vp exp(-jØ).

The real part of this, apart from a factor of a half, is the real power
used-by/dissipated-in the load. This is real power, and labeled by W or
kW. The modulus of the vector sum of the real and imaginary parts is
nevertheless useful, and it is labeled in VA or KVA. More concisely:
IrmsVrms is labeled in KVA or VA, the real power
IrmsVrmscos(Ø) is labeled in W or kW.

The imaginary power IrmsVrmssin(Ø) is still
significant -- a motor with a non-unity power factor draws current in excess of
what one would estimate based on power alone. In the extreme case of a purely
reactive load, no power is used, but the power supply must still be capable of
providing current, and the cables of carrying it. Hence, power engineers use
KVA in sizing elements of the power distribution and supply systems,
particularly transformers.

Yiddish, `complain [repeatedly and irritatingly].' About the same as
`whine' or `bitch and moan.' In a little more morphological detail: the
infinitive in Yiddish is kvetchn, and in English the verb root has been
abstracted and the conjugation domesticated (kvetch, kvetched, kvetching). In
both Yiddish and English, ``a kvetch'' or ``a kvetcher' is a person who
constantly kvetches.

I've never seen an etymological dictionary of Yiddish, but in German this would
be written quetsch. The German noun Quetsche means `plum,' and
the verb quetschen means `squeeze.' Also, Quetsch is the name of
a plum variety that is used in Alsace, primarily to make a fruit brandy (which
is also called Quetsch).

I don't see what this-- oh!

Here's another German word: Quatsch. It started out as the onomatopeoic
verb quatschen, `squish' (to make the sound that comes from pressing a
moist or water-logged mass). In the nineteenth century, it came to mean
`prate, talk nonsense,' and the noun Quatsch was coined to mean
`nonsense, balderdash.' I'm not sure
what relationship there is between the verbs quetschen and
quatschen. It seems there might be some influence, at least.

KVI

Known-Value Item. A common product frequently purchased, whose price
customers are likely to remember. On the reasoning that these will be the
items whose prices will be the basis of comparison shopping, stores may
use KVI's as loss-leaders -- low or negative profit used to attract customers.

KVL

Kirchhoff Voltage Law: the sum of voltage drops around a closed loop is
zero. This is simply a statement of the fact that electrostatic potential is
a single-valued quantity. The general statement is not correct in the presence
of induction (a net changing normal magnetic field integral over an area
enclosed by the loop), but for periodic systems it can be supplemented by the
equivalent statement for individual frequency components of the voltage.

KW is sort of appropriate, for a country whose only
significant resource is petroleum.

Kwame Touré

Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998). This is not to suggest that his born name
was somehow better than his adopted one, but some of us like to keep track.

KWIC

KeyWord In Context.

Most of this stuff has since been replaced by online search tools (see, for
example, concordance.com), but many
university libraries still have a few such dusty tomes in the reference section.
The 1960's and 70's were a sort of golden age for these volumes, typically
printed in nonproportional font, often in all-caps. Just thinking about it, I
can hear the line printer farting a burst of asterisk lines. For old times'
sake, let's take a stroll down acid-paper lane... Ah! A Concordance to the
plays and [mostly much longer, axe-grinding and stupid editorializing]
prefaces of Bernard Shaw in ten volumes, compiled by E. Dean Bevan
(Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1971). Bevan
had help, however. Singled out for special recognition was one keypunch
operator (if you don't know what this means, ask your oldest living ancestor),
``Pamela Toburen, who for nearly a year sat at the keyboard for three to four
hours a day, punching a staggering 2,378 pages of text with unparalleled
accuracy.'' Following are the Dumas entries from volume 3. (The lines in this
concordance are 131 columns long, from beginning to end of printable area; you
may have to widen your browser window.)

OVER PREFACE(161) DOWN TO THE LATEST GUILTY COUPLE OF THE SCHOOL OF DUMAS FILS, THE ROMANTIC ADULTERERS HAVE ALL BEEN
METH PREFACE(R84) WHICH MAKES HIS PLAYS, LIKE THE MODELS OF SCOTT, DUMAS , AND DICKENS, SO DELIGHTFUL. ALSO, HE DEVELOPED THAT
FABL PREFACE( 64) A DISEASE? SHAKESPEAR, WALTER SCOTT, ALEXANDRE DUMAS , MYSELF: ARE WE ALL MENTAL CASES? ARE WE SIMPLY

The stuff in the first seventeen character spaces cites the source.
OVER stood for his probably justly forgotten work ``Overruled,''
METH for ``Back to Methuselah'' (preface only; the individual
parts of his ``pentateuch'' are coded as MTH1 through MTH5; R84 stands for page
lxxxiv), and FABL for ``Farfetched Fables.''
(In this simple case, the lengths of preceding and following context are fixed.
In cases where these are allowed to vary, the context field might be rotated
in a wrap-around field, with the end of a long following context appearing at
the beginning of the line. I really don't want to think about this, or about
what happened when the preceding context was long.)

Entries were ordered first by keyword, next alphabetically by (word of) context
following keyword. Obviously, a number of editorial choices are necessary.
Certain frequently-occurring words did not get entries (ALL would have required
seven thousand lines). The available computing power and programming guts
dictated that the collation (``alphabetical'')
order used was that native to the Honeywell 635, to wit:

There are no examples of KWIC's in Eugene Garfield's Citation Indexing--Its
Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities (Wiley,
1979). I mention it only because I already transcribed the author and title
and stuff, so why waste the work? You can
read that book and get a feel for the ``advanced information resources'' of an
earlier, quickly bygone era.

Ah! The book I had been looking for was the even thinner volume by T(revor)
H(oward) Howard-Hill. (If I had two Howards in my name I'd use more initials
too.) It's called Literary Concordances : A Complete Handbook for the
Preparation of Manual and Computer Concordances (Pergamon Pr., 1979).

The double KWIC is a variation on KWIC indexing which identifies an important
term within the context of each keyword and does a secondary alphabetization
with respect to the subsidiary term. That is, entries for a common keyword
are ordered alphabetized by secondary keyword rather than by context following
the KW. I'm not sure a double-KWIC has ever been published for English work,
but you could read more about them in Lucille H. Campey, Generating and
Printing Indexes by Computer, ASLIB Occasional Publications, No. 11
(London: ASLIB, 1972).

KWOC

KeyWord Out of Context. The following is probably not an
example of what ``KWOC'' is intended to describe:

If at first you don't succeed, then try,
try,
and
try,
again,
until you convict.

Now that we've got that out of the way, I should mention that a KWOC is usually
a KWIC with the keyword printed at the top left of an entry or sequence of
entries. While that is the only necessary difference in principle, in practice
the term KWOC implies a bit more. The redundant use of keywords as headwords
betokens a willingness to sacrifice efficiency for the convenience of the user,
ease-of-use, or user-friendliness (is that clear?). Hence, once can expect
mixed case, more white space, and features that make the volume look more like
a traditional (i.e. manual) concordance. (For a bit more on the latter,
see the article by Joseph Raben, ``The death of the handmade concordance,'' in
Scholarly Publishing, vol. 1, no. 1 (1969), pp. 61-9.) Features
that become possible once a separate line is introduced for the keyword
headword include
cross-reference information (for alternate spellings and related words) and a
count of the total number of occurrences (like the parenthesied 3 below). If
the Shaw concordance exampled in the KWIC
definition above had been done as a KWOC, it might have looked like

DUMAS (3)
down to the latest guilty couple of the school of Dumas fils, the romantic adulterers have all been Over. Pref. 161
which makes his plays, like the models of Scott, Dumas , and Dickens, so delightful. Also, he developed that Meth. Pref. r84
a disease? Shakespear, Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas , myself: are we all mental cases? Are we simply Fabl. Pref. 64

A common feature of traditional concordances is a certain flexible
inconsistency: rather than simply include or exclude keywords, omitting any
entry at all for the more common keywords, traditional concordances have an
intermediate strategy. While most keywords have detailed entries and a small
number of very common words have no entry, the remaining words, of intermediate
frequency, have a listing only of their locations. When a KWOC does this, of
course, it is no longer a special case of a KWIC.

Using the present tense to write this entry felt kind of weird, justified
mostly by the fact that KWOC's are still read in libraries, even if they are no
longer published. KWIC's and KWOC's are like tables of logarithms -- providing
the kind of information least appropriate to continue publishing in paper.

Okay, since you're all so interested that you've read through to the end of the
entry, here's an actual example of a KWOC, rather than a reworked KWIC. It's
from A Concordance to the Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Tomomi
Kato (University of Tokyo Press, 1974). This was the heroic tree-murdering
sort of concordance, with 43.5 columns of concordance for the word a.
According to the word-frequencies data at the back of this concordance, that
word occurred 4953 times (2981 in the narrative, 1972 in dialogue or
``conversation''), and represented 1.4435% of the words in the text. A quick
skim suggests that the three most common words are and (6.4655%),
the (3.9922%), and that (2.4560%, the alternate form thatt
occurs once, for a total of 2.4562%).
I am not so ambitious; here's the entry for the word fyres:

FYRES
THERE HE FYNDYS TWO FYRES FLAMAND FULL HYGHE 05 05 0200 19 B
COWRE AND TO SYT BY FYRES), SO THYS SEASON 20 01 1161 06 A

The second line comes from book twenty, chapter one, page 1161 (you didn't
think I was going to write that out, did you?) and line 6 (I'm unpredictable).
The absence of a ``C'' in the second-to-last field means that this was
narrative rather than ``conversation.'' It was transcribed by ``hand A''
according to Eugène Vinaver's edition.

KX

King's Cross. It's not some fancy kind of
castling in chess. It's a major rail terminal north of London (and a stop on
the underground, not inconveniently nor by accident...).

On Sunday, February 10, 1946, a slow (non-express) passenger train, traveling
from Hatfield to KX, approached the Potters Bar station north of London too
quickly. It derailed at a switch, toppling sideways. The derailed train was
then hit by a London-to-Edinburgh express, and that mess was in turn hit by a
southbound Bradford-to-London express. It might've been worse; two
soldiers were killed and seventeen other people were injured.

On Friday, May 10, 2002, a high-speed train (going from KX to King's Lynn, in
Norfolk) derailed as it passed through Potters Bar. Travelling at about 100
MPH, the last car of the four-car electric train
swung off the tracks, smashed into a bridge next
to the station, and slid across two platforms, hitting waiting rooms at the
station. It eventually came to a stop when it became wedged underneath the
platform canopy. Seven people died, mostly among the thirty passengers in the
derailed car, and over seventy were injured. (The forward cars, with 121
passengers, lost a set of wheels and came to stop a third of a mile past the
station.)

Everyone was appalled. My gawd -- two accidents at the same station, in the
space of a little over 56 years! That's it, from now on I'm driving.

.ky

(Domain name code for) Cayman Islands.

KY

KentuckY. USPS abbreviation. It's not very
dignified to have to share an abbreviation with a, um,
personal lubricant, but
Kentucky doesn't stand on ceremony. Mostly, it stands on the side of a hill of
carbonaceous deposits.

Popular song suggests that Maxwell's equations don't have the same kinds of
solutions in or on or over Kentucky as they do elsewhere. For example,
there's Bill Monroe's ``Blue Moon of Kentucky'' (1947). The singer beseeches
the ``[b]lue moon of Kentucky [to] keep on shining.'' Dang, blue moons rarely
even start to shine in other states. Then in ``Kentucky Woman,'' Neil
Diamond sang repeatedly that ``[s]he shines in her own kind of light.'' I hope
to get to the bottom of this someday. Until then, if you visit Kentucky I
recommend you take an extra set of batteries.

Japanese, `cap.' A loanword (gairaigo)
from English, used in the sense of a hat (of Western style, of course),

kyoiku-mama

Japanese, literally: `education mother.' This term is pejorative: the
mother is seen as relentlessly driving her child to study, to the detriment of
the child's social and physical development, and emotional well-being.
Education experts -- who are the same fatuous rascals in
Japan as everywhere -- warn constantly about the
dangers. They also blame domineering mothers for children who experience
``school rejection'' in their sense of school phobia in children. To get some
realistic perspective on this, you might see the
juku entry.

I use the singular ``child'' above advisedly, by the way. The most recent data
since the turn of the century show Japanese fertility around 1.3
or 1.4 -- way below replacement rate (usually estimated as 2.1 children per
woman).

In the head term of this entry, mama is a foreign borrowing; in Japanese
it is written in katakana. (Cf.mama-haha.) It would now be possible, at least,
to borrow an equivalent term from English. I don't think the term is common,
but see ``push parenting.''

kyou

A Japanese word that currently refers to
self-sacrifice for a yakuza superior. Originally
referred (as the Chinese term still does) to voluntary self-sacrifice for a
friend.

.kz

(Domain name code for) Kazakhstan. If you insist on
pronouncing the kh as /k/ instead of the hard, glottalized aitch (written
/x/ in the IPA), then not only may you be mistaken
for an airhead TV newsreader, but you'll have some major problems sorting
out a history that includes Cossacks.

KZ

Konzentrationslager. German, `concentration camp.'

K'zoo

KalamaZOO, Michigan. Site of the annual International Congress of Medieval
Studies, sponsored by the Medieval
Institute at WMU. Parchment, MI, is only a
couple of miles north. This is the principal annual meeting of medievalists,
at least in the Anglophone world.

I'v never seen the name of the international congress abbreviated ICMS. It's
usually referred to as ``Kalamazoo'' and abbreviated K'zoo. Makes me think of
tiny, tinny, one-note flutes.

K1

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. US State Department slang for the senior cleric
and theocrat of Iran. Cf.K2.

Mohammad Khatami. US State Department slang for the cleric and president
of Iran (elected in a landslide in 1997). He held power subordinate to
K1. That ought to make the late Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini (1900-89) K0; he was born Ruhollah Hendi and adopted a Kh name in 1930.

The K1 and K2 slang terms were mentioned in a New York Times article in the
Week In Review Section, in June 2000.

K-20

Kindergarten through the fourth year of graduate school. Honest to God.
After I saw it in a mailing-list CFPP, I wrote the
organizer (in the southeastern US) and she replied, ``[y]es, the new `term' we
educators are supposed to use these days instead of K-16. Glad you noticed
it!!''

The SEA blithely uses ``K-20'' in
a CFP (submission
deadline Nov. 21, 2003) posted to the ASSESS mailing list (Nov. 25, 2003). Is
it too late to stop the spread of this pernicious abbreviation beyond the
southeastern US? The outlook is grim.

K-8

A complete Old-Order Amish education.

Earlier this year, I was in the Wendy's on Dixie Way
towards closing and I overheard an argument. An employee was angry because a
customer had grabbed her and the manager had seen it and done nothing. The
manager was temporizing sophistically, and the employee was giving notice.

I saw her before she finally left and told her she was in the right. I pointed
out that, ``to be blunt, you're the cutest girl here'' and she jumped in to say
that this was the reason the others didn't understand. [Note to self: beautiful persons socially
disadvantaged-- challenged; need legislation; must found
research group, call the Carnegie,
MacArthur, People Like You] I asked why she didn't get a job as a
waitress in a restaurant with more enlightened management. She explained ``I'm
in adult school! I haven't even graduated from eighth grade!'' Later, she
showed me the mood-ring-luster bead on her pierced tongue. She's probably not
Amish.

I hadn't realized that there were educational requirements, but come to think
of it, the waitresses at Nick's Patio have all completed at least
K-12. I guess the Amish must have a serious
shortage of people qualified to wait table in their
Greek restaurants. For a moment, you yourself
probably wondered whether a complete HS education is
needed for identifying, communicating, and delivering
food items. It is needed -- for many
reasons, not all obvious.

Traditionally, of course, completion of high school was a demonstration of
determination and emotional maturity, and hence a token of desirable work
habits. Today, as we know, it requires no determination or maturity at all,
and may even suggest a reluctance to work. However, as the topics explored in
school have become more diversity-sensitive, relevance-oriented, and
quality-driven, it has been necessary to delay the introduction of certain
difficult topics. [Long ago (1969), unenlightened teachers used those subjects
to indoctrinate students in patriarchal Western ``culture.''] HS graduation
now guarantees that the prospective waitperson has been exposed to spelling and
arithmetic issues, viewed from a rich and diverse range of modern and
traditional third-world perspectives. This is helpful when the cash register
goes off-line.

(For the record, I've learned that Nick's does hire waiters and waitresses
without HS diplomas.)

K9, K-9

Rebus for Canine. Police K-9 units are composed of trainer-and-dog teams.
See this entry concerning an occupational
hazard. See also B-9.